The
January 2007 edition of Northern Lights, a regular column from Canada by Barry Weisleder, appears in the San Francisco–based monthly
newspaper Socialist Action.To subscribe to the
newspaper, get the details at the SA web site.

StephaneDion, the Chamæleon with a Past

The
come-from-behind win of StephaneDion
at the federal Liberal leadership convention in early December rattled the
party’s establishment and boosted Liberals in opinion polls. To capture the
crown Dion, the 51-year-old former Université de Montréal political science professor
turned-politician, wrapped himself in the green flag. He tried to sound like an
innovator in his appeal to the 4,600 delegates, knowing that the
scandal-plagued party was desperate for a radical make over. And he worked hard
to downplay his notorious hostility to Québec national rights.

But
sooner than later the record of this chamæleon will
catch up with him. Behind the shy grin and bookish awkwardness is a hard-line
political pro who made his bed with corporate Canada
long ago. (Thus there are no worries on Bay Street, despite their first
preferences, Harvard professor Michael Ignatieff and
former Ontario NDP Premier Bob Rae, coming in second and third respectively).

Dion was recruited
to the government team by former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien after the
near-victory by sovereignists in the 1995 Québec
referendum. As Minister of Inter-Governmental Affairs, 1996–2003, Dion was the eager architect of the anti-democratic Clarity
Act. The law enables Parliament to veto a majority vote by the Québécois people
for self-government. For that, he remains vilified in his home province, and
not surprisingly came third in Liberal delegate strength in Québec, behind Ignatieff and Rae. Liberal insiders maintain that in
general elections Québecers usually favour one of their own, and there is some truth to that
claim — but such support will more likely come at the expense of the
Conservatives rather than via a growth of the pro-federalist vote there.

“We
need to add environmental sustainability at the core of who we are as Liberals,”
Dion said at his maiden news conference as leader. But
it appears this will take some doing.

In
1993 the Liberals promised to reduce greenhouse gases by 20% by 2005. Instead
they allowed them to increase by over 30%.

Last
fall, a UN report concluded that Canada’s pollution has increased more than any
other signatory to the Kyoto Protocol. The federal Environment Commissioner
said “Even if the measures contained in the [Liberal] government’s 2005 plan
had been fully implemented, it is difficult to say whether the projected
emission reductions would have been enough to meet our Kyoto obligations…[the
plan was] not up to the task of meeting the Kyoto obligations.” — Report of the
Environment Commissioner, Overview, page 9, 28 September 2006.

As
federal Environment Minister, 2004–2006, Dion had a
golden opportunity to demonstrate the real extent of his commitment to dealing
with climate change — and perhaps he did. (That is, apart from naming his snow
white Husky dog “Kyoto”). At the U.N. climate conference in Nairobi, Kenya,
Canada placed 51st out of 56 countries that were assessed for their
performance and policies on climate change.

“The
Liberal Party have no credibility on cleaning our
environment. It’s incredible to see them use one of their greatest failures as
a rallying point,” said the environment critic for the labour-based
New Democratic Party, Nathan Cullen. “The Liberals can change their leader but
they can’t change their record.”

What
about ethics? NDP MP Pat Martin pointed out that StephaneDion was silent on the Québec sponsorship scandal and
on the question of accountability. And his competition was no better, including
Gerard Kennedy, the former Ontario Education Minister whose support at the
Liberal convention catapulted Dion into first place
on the third ballot. Kennedy’s 10,000 word platform did not mention the word “ethics.”
Neither did Michael Ignatieff’s 42 page policy
document. Bob Rae made no speech on ethics or accountability whatsoever.

“We
read today of almost a million dollars in loans to Bob Rae from Power Corp’s
John Rae,” said the NDP’s Pat Martin. “The candidates
have failed to address big money’s influence in this leadership race. Whether
it’s [Joe] Volpe’s addiction to Apotex (the
pharmaceutical giant) or Rae’s addiction to Power Corp, we see the Liberal
Party’s continued addiction to corporate money.”

Though
Dion was not the first choice of the bosses of the
political party that has governed Canada two-thirds of the time since the
country was founded in 1867, the economic “powers that be” still run the show,
and now he is their man — a man on whom they can rely.

Dion sat at the
Cabinet table when Liberals betrayed their promise to create 150,000 new child
care spaces. After 12 years and three majority governments, and 8 years of
back-to-back surpluses equalling over $63 billion,
the kids of working women and men are still waiting.

In
their first four years in office, the Liberals cut over $25 billion from health
care and education, scrapped the Canada Assistance Plan, scrapped the federal
role in building affordable housing, and reduced eligibility for women to get
Employment Insurance. Today Dion ranks “social
equality” as one of his top three policy planks. But what was he doing about
those savage anti-social cuts during his ten years in office?

We
do know what he was saying during the escalation of Ottawa’s imperialist
military adventures. Ten months ago, as his party’s foreign affairs critic, Dion was a staunch backer of the decision to send Canadian
troops into combat in Kandahar.

“It’s
a very important mission and we want to be there,” he told a Canadian Press
reporter in early March. “We will succeed in Afghanistan if we show a lot of
determination,” he said on CTV a few days later. “We need to be resolute and to
succeed.” (Is it possible that Donald Rumsfeld was
his voice coach?)

In
September, when NDP leader Jack Layton called on the government to withdraw its
troops by early 2007, Dion was caustic. “No one wants
us to get out now, like Mr. Layton, in dishonour,” he
said on September 17.

But
today, in the wake of ongoing street protests and opinion polls that show a
majority in opposition to the war (especially in Québec), Dion
states that trying to “kill the Taliban in every corner of the mountains doesn’t
work”, and that he is not committed to keeping Canadian troops in Kandahar until 2009. Mind you, that should not be mistaken
for a principled “troops out now” position. It merely shows the political chamæleon adapting to his environment.

One
thing that the leadership race succeeded in doing for the Liberals is putting
the squeeze on the NDP — which was precisely what the soft-left Bob Rae and
Gerard Kennedy campaigns were calculated to do.

According
to a Toronto Star-EKOS Research poll released on December 9, the Liberals would
be close to winning a majority government with the support of 40.1 per cent of
decided voters, compared to 33.5 per cent for the current minority government
Conservatives led by Stephen Harper. The NDP is down to 10.2 per cent across
the country, well below the 17.5 per cent of the vote it received in the
January 2006 federal election. Now the Green Party is within striking distance
at 7.6 per cent. The Bloc Québécois, which runs candidates only in Québec, leads
in that province with 34.7 per cent support.

Once
the pro-Liberal media adulation dies down, and the gloss is off StephaneDion, the NDP vote will
rebound. But the NDP’s eternal weakness remains Québec.
The latest NDP policies, including more powers for Québec (asymmetrical
federalism) and a pledge to respect a future vote on sovereignty, may help. Noticeable,
however, was the party’s silence on Dion’s record on
the Québec question, despite stinging NDP criticism directed at him on many
other legitimate issues.

A
final footnote: the mercurial David Orchard, Saskatchewan organic farmer and
arch-Canadian nationalist who twice came close to winning the leadership of the
Progressive Conservative Party, arrived at the Liberal leadership convention
commanding a platoon of 175 delegates totally loyal to his choice for leader. According
to The Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom,
Orchard joined the Liberal Party last January and with his supporters set about
capturing a solid bloc of riding associations in the west where the party is
weak.

And
who was Orchard backing all the way? None other than StephaneDion, the strongest opponent of Québec’s national
rights in the field, next to Gerard Kennedy, and Kennedy’s most celebrated
supporter, Justin Trudeau (son of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau).
Both are bitterly opposed to recognition of the concept of a Québec nation, and
both rallied to Dion after the second ballot.

Canadian Imperialism Doing Just Fine,
Thanks

Corporate
giants headquartered in Canada are significantly larger and more numerous than
they were 20 years ago, according to the University of Toronto’s Institute for
Competitiveness and Prosperity (don’t ya just love
the name?).

In
1985, thirty-three Canadian companies ranked among the top five in the world in
their particular business. Now, the Canadian corporate elite has
more than doubled its global impact, with 72 companies that lead the world.

In
a study to be released early in 2007, the business school also found that
average annual revenue for Canada’s leading companies is $3.7 billion, up from
$2 billion in 1985, after adjusting for inflation.

Canadians
concerned about the foreign takeover of household names such as Hiram Walker,
Hudson’s Bay Co., and more recently, Inco and
Falconbridge, need not worry. James Milway, the
institute’s director, argued that those folks frequently don’t notice the
ascendance of global players such as auto parts maker Linamar
and health sciences giant MDS Inc. “There’s a lot of renewal and churn going on
in Corporate Canada,” he said. “We ought not to get fixated on the big
announcements.”

The
conclusions are the result of an extensive examination of all the ups and downs
of Canada’s leading companies over the past 20 years. Roger Martin, dean of the
U of T’s Rotman School of Management and head of the
institute, argues that rather than dwelling on companies that have been taken
over by foreign investors, business and political leaders should focus on
fostering new world-class entities to take their place in specific, albeit
narrower, market niches.

Twenty
years ago, Canadian firms led in basic fields such as spirits and wines,
nickel, asbestos, solid waste management and real estate. Today, according to
the study, Canadian companies lead in environmental compliance technology,
postage stamps, gastrointestinal products and wollastonite,
a mineral fibre used in ceramics, auto parts and
concrete.

That
trend will likely persist into the future, Mr. Martin said. As globalization
speeds up, big countries with big markets produce global companies that gobble
their smaller competitors — unless the smaller competitors develop dominance in
their own market niche, he said.

To
survive, the idea is to “specialize,” and then acquire others in your field —
what ever may be the cost to workers and consumers. A case in point is Chemtrade Logistics Income Fund. Since the Toronto-based
company became an income trust in 2001, it has bought interests in Switzerland
and the United States. It is now a global leader in sulphuric
acid, liquid sulphur dioxide, and sodium hydrosulphite.

“What’s
happening is an industrial revolution-like transformation…a global
rearrangement of industries,” Mr. Martin said. “Some of each nation’s companies
are goingout and buying companies and going global, and some are
getting bought up. That’s just the nature of the beast.”

Indeed
it is. And that brings us to our next item.

Canadian Corporate Cannibals Eat More

“Canadian
companies continued to be more acquisitive of foreign companies than vice
versa, with Canadian firms buying 363 foreign companies in the first nine
months of the year, compared with 138 foreign acquisitions of Canadian
companies.”

Canadian
mergers and acquisitions totaled $90.3-billion in the third quarter, shattering
a quarterly record dating back to the peak of the technology boom, Crosbie & Co. Inc. stated on November 22.

In
its quarterly report on Canadian mergers and acquisitions, the Toronto-based
investment bank said the third-quarter total eclipsed the previous record of
$79.1 billion set in the second quarter of 2000. It surpassed the $68.9 billion
of deals in the second quarter this year and was almost double the $53.7
billion in the year-earlier third quarter.

The
third-quarter numbers got a big boost from the $19.9 billion takeover of Inco Ltd. by Brazil’s Companhia
Vale do Rio Doce. But that wasn’t the only big deal
in the quarter: Crosbie said there were 18
transactions valued at more than $1 billion, accounting for $69.8 billion in
value, up from 10 such mega-deals worth $45.2 billion in the second quarter,
and 12 mega-deals worth $36.4 billion a year earlier.

In
total, there were 420 M&A transactions in the Canadian market in the third
quarter, compared with 517 in the second quarter and 398 in the year-earlier
period. The energy sector was the busiest for M&A activity in the quarter,
with 91 transactions. The sector ranked second by value, at $17 billion. The
base-metals sector had the highest value, $23.8 billion on 55 deals, led by the
Inco takeover. The gold group had 14 transactions
valued at $15.1 billion.

In
the technology sector, “M&A activity was more brisk this quarter than it
has been for some time,” Crosbie noted. The sector
had 26 deals totalling $7.6 billion, “a level not
seen since the tech boom era in 2001.”

Who Owns the World?

The
rich, right? The extent to which that is true is now more painfully apparent.

In
a first-ever exhaustive study of global wealth, it’s clear just how inequitably
the wealth of the world is distributed.

The
richest 2 per cent of adults own more than half of global household wealth, and almost all of the affluent live in North
America, Europe and the richest Asia-Pacific countries.

While
previous global surveys studied income, this is the first wide-ranging analysis
of the international distribution of wealth, defined as the value of physical
and financial assets minus liabilities.

“We
find there’s a lot of inequality, which is what we expected and is not that
surprising,” said University of Western Ontario economist James Davies, who was
a co-author of the study, conducted by the Helsinki-based World Institute for
Development Economics Research of the United Nations. “But it turns out, the world distribution of wealth [assets minus debts]
is more unequal than the world distribution of income.”

The
United States is the richest country, with a mean wealth in the year 2000 of
$144,000 (U.S.) per person. Canada has a mean wealth of $89,000 per person. Needless
to say, mean averages tend to conceal the concentration of ownership in the
class of business owners.

“Wealth
in this sense represents the ownership of capital,” the study says. “While only
one part of personal resources, capital is widely believed to have a
disproportionate impact on household well-being and economic success, and more
broadly on economic development and growth.”

The
study estimates that the richest 1 per cent of adults alone owned 40 per cent
of global assets in 2000, and that the richest 10 per cent of adults accounted
for 85 per cent of the world total. By contrast, the bottom half of the world
adult population owned barely 1 per cent of global wealth.

Toronto Activists Celebrate Venezuela Election Win

Over
120 people crowded the Concord Cafe in downtown Toronto on December 5 for an
evening of music, drinks and speeches to celebrate the Dec. 3 election victory
of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution (Chávez won 63% of the votes cast) in Venezuela. The event
was broadly co-sponsored, including by the Venezuela We are with you Coalition,
the Hands Off Venezuela campaign, the Latin American
Solidarity Coalition, and the Manuelita Saenz and
Louis Riel Bolivarian Circles. The gathering was addressed by representatives
of the sponsoring groups, by official emissaries of the Venezuelan and Cuban
consulates in Toronto, the president of the Canadian Arab Federation, and
spokespersons for the Toronto Haiti Action Committee, a Chilean-Mapuche peoples’ solidarity group, and some political
organizations.

The
following is the statement I was privileged to make on behalf of Toronto Socialist
Action: “Sisters and brothers, comrades and friends, what a fine gathering this
is. Welcome to my neighbourhood bar. I’m so glad we
have something great to celebrate and that we’ve held this event tonight to
mark the occasion. Socialist Action is thrilled by the resounding election
victory of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution.
The victory is a vindication of wealth redistribution in favour
of the poor, in favour of health and literacy, in favour of jobs and power for growing numbers of working
people. It is victory for an agenda that calls for 21st century socialism and
thus an end to the plundering, violent and oppressive rule of global greed
(discreetly known as world capitalism).

With
good reason, Hugo Chávez is the most popular politician,
not only in Latin America, but also in Asia, in Africa, in the Middle East and
possibly amongst the disempowered masses of North America as well. While
Canadian governments are closing women’s centres,
homeless shelters, and schools — while our rulers are feeding the military and
the rich at the expense of working people, the poor and visible minorities —
things are clearly moving in the opposite direction in Venezuela. And that’s
something truly worth celebrating.

But
let’s not get carried away. There’s still a lot of work to be done. We are just
approaching the threshold of the final conflict.

First
of all, we have a sacred duty to humanity to defend the gains of the Bolivarian
Revolution. The vultures of reaction have been dealt a series of blows, but
they grow hungry for revenge. I refer not just to Manuel Rosales and the
stunted, self-centred, bourgeoisie he represents. I
refer to Washington and its global partners in crime, including the junior
imperialist government in Ottawa, which aim to turn back the clock.

History
may be on our side, but time is not. Delay can be a fatal enemy of revolution
if it allows reaction to regroup and strike again. It will be increasingly
apparent to the workers and farmers of Venezuela that their precious gains
cannot be fully extended, and can never be consolidated, unless they take power
into their own hands. The future depends on replacing the capitalist state with
the organized, independent power of the working class and oppressed social
layers, who must become the new masters of a democratically planned,
collectively owned economy.

What
is our task here? It is to give them the maximum time and space to secure
victory. That means we have a duty to educate and to mobilize public opinion,
starting in the unions and the NDP, to demand that Ottawa break with Washington’s
policy, that Ottawa foster fair bi-lateral trade, increase cultural and
political relations with Caracas. We should demand that the federal government
turn a new leaf in its relations with Latin America. Support ALBA. Demand
freedom for the Cuba Five. Demand that the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles be extradited to Venezuela to face his accusers.
Insist that the Chilean butcher Augusto Pinochet go
to trial for his crimes against humanity. [Pinochet died after this article was
written.—Editors.] Cancel the perfidious Third World debt. Get the
Canadian cops and troops the hell out of Haiti, Afghanistan and the Persian
Gulf now! Money for healthcare, not for warfare!

It’s
time to take our stand with the rising tide of revolt across Latin America. A
victory for the Venezuelan workers is a victory for workers in this country and
all around the world.